Becoming Modern Women: Love & Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature & Culture (review)

Women, identity, and modernity have been hot topics in Japanese studies for two decades now. Becoming Modern Women: Love & Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature & Culture, nominally in the field of literature but also covering cultural history, joins the growing list of works on women, women's movements, and the literature of prewar Japan. Michiko Suzuki uses "love" as a theme bringing together her examination of three female authors—Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973), Miyamoto Yuriko (1899-1951), and Okamoto Kanoko (1889-1939); she "analyzes these writers' works in relation to discourses that pertain to same-sex love, love marriage, and maternal love" (p. 16).

Within these three larger categories, Suzuki also examines sexology discourse, the Bluestocking movement, and Hiratsuka Raichō and her role in feminist Japan. The book is divided into three parts (for each type of "love"); each part begins by establishing the context surrounding all three writers and then ends with a closer study of each author and her works. That's a lot to fit into a relatively short book (150 pages of main text, plus 84 pages of endnotes, bibliography, and index), and although I would be the first to say that this is a very carefully researched book, at times it suffers from a breakneck pace through material that deserves a little more time.

The first section, on same-sex love, examines both adolescent and adult love. At first, however, there is an implicit divide between the two categories that goes beyond age; the former is platonic while the latter is physical. I say "implicit" because the distinction, while supported by Suzuki's examples, is not clearly stated. In one example, Suzuki quotes Yoshiya in her 1923 essay Dōsei o aisuru saiwai (The happiness of loving one of the same sex) as follows: "At this time, the girl experiences an extremely close romantic friendship during her schooldays, and this develops into a huge force. . . . What a pure and dear episode this is in a girl's life! ... When this romantic friendship occurs between an older girl and a younger one, or between a teacher and her student, it is extremely positive in terms of educational value, and its worth is immeasurable" (p. 36). Later, again referring to Yoshiya, Suzuki writes, "Just as pure love and carnal love are often discussed in terms of sexual difference (with females associated with spiritual love and males associated with physical love), same-sex love becomes, through this logic, a part of female virtue and even a manifestation of spirituality and innocence" (p. 37). At this point in the text, the reader might be forgiven for imagining that for Yoshiya, "same-sex love" is always "pure" and a product of adolescence, never "carnal" and continued into adulthood. But a few pages later we read about Yoshiya's novel, Two Virgins in the Attic, in which the adult heroines are lesbian lovers. The reader then has what are really two topics: platonic, adolescent love and carnal, adult love. Yoshiya is not so easily categorized, however. Suzuki tells us that in the 1930s Yoshiya "represented adult same-sex love not as an alternative to heterosexuality but as a kind of sisterhood, an integral part of female identity that complements heterosexuality. Here the love between women is a pure and permanent bond that can be sustained throughout the female life cycle" (p. 60; italics Suzuki's). How does this type of same-sex love overlap with or fit in with the two earlier examples? Yoshiya does not tell us, and Suzuki concludes that "Yoshiya's prewar works revisit modern love ideology [defined on page 13 as the "notion that true love is an amalgamation of spiritual and sexual love, and that this love is the basis for female development"], interrogating the connection between female self-discovery and the promise of heterosexual romance. Despite (or because of) the silences in these texts, Yoshiya is able to champion eloquently the importance...